Software Cartography

Eclipse Plug-In

Source code

Videos

People

— “It is our vision that developers can speak of code as ‘up in the north’, ‘over in the west’, or ‘down-under in south’. We want to provide developers, and everyone else involved in software development, with a shared and spatial and stable mental model of their project. They way we try to reinforce this, is by providing a map in the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The map is always visible in the bottom-left, just like the GPS navigation device in your car. For each development task, related information is displayed on the map.”

The consistent layout of codemaps helps to establish a stable mental model of software systems. Codemaps use the same visual language as cartographic visualizations found in an atlas. Different phenomena, ranging from population density to industry sectors, weather forecast, birth rate, or even flow of trade, all displayed and expressed using the same layout.

Software Cartography helps to

navigate within a software system.

relate different metrics to each other, eg search results and bug prediction.